A growing portion of India’s Internet users is set to come from people with less privileged backgrounds. Above, Mumbai dabbawallahs take part in an IT class initiated by The Agrawal Institute of Management and Technology in September.

When Google launched its Hindi translator in 2007, it opened doors to a growing community of Indians who were long constrained by language. Social networking giant Twitter now has followed suit.

Celebrating Hindi Diwas, the anniversary of the day Hindi was declared a national language, the microblogging site launched its Hindi portal Wednesday.

So what’s in store for Indian Twitter users? They can now change their interface settings to Hindi and start tweeting in Hindi script. To type in Hindi, they also need software with a Hindi font and a compatible keyboard. Twitter mobile applications are also available in Hindi.

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Previously, users could tweet in Hindi but it was rather cumbersome: you had to go through Google’s transliterating tool and paste that onto Twitter. As a result, users needed to be reasonably fluent English, or other Twitter languages, to use the microblogging site.

Twitter is just the latest in a string of social media giants to launch a Hindi portal. But will this make a difference when English is so entrenched as the language of the Internet?

And a growing portion of India’s Internet users is set to come from people, often in rural areas, with less privileged backgrounds compared to the web-savvy urbanites who have dominated web traffic so far in India. Among that new population, English is less common – yet the potential market for Internet companies is huge, which explains why Facebook, Google, YouTube and now Twitter are ramping up their Hindi offerings.

“Just like the television has become an indispensable part of households in villages today, the internet is soon to follow” said Sasidharan, a Chennai-based social media analyst who only goes by one name.

Mr. Sasidharan noted that today several small-scale entrepreneurs and NGOs have opened cyber cafés in villages. These frequently function as training centers aimed at equipping locals with tech skills.

The expansion won’t just come in Hindi. Google also offers searches in other eight Indian languages including Punjabi, Bengali and Tamil. Facebook, too, is available in many Indian languages, including Telugu and Malayalam. The social networking site launched its Hindi portal in May 2009.

But Hindi is the most widely-spoken Indian language and Hindi blogging is also on the rise. IndiBlogger, a popular Indian blog portal, hosted just 350 Hindi blogs in 2010. Now they host over 1,300 blogs in Hindi, many of which originate from bloggers based in towns and smaller Indian cities. (This blog also is translated into Hindi)

Mala Kumari, 15 years old, moved to Delhi from a village in Uttar Pradesh. When she saw Facebook in Hindi at a friend’s small cyber café, she registered “to see what the hype was about.” Ms. Kumari, who studies in a Hindi-medium school also registered her parents on the networking site. Though her parents can’t operate Facebook, she created profiles in the hope that they might learn one day.

Arun Singh, a student majoring in rural development, who lives in Tuljapur near Pune, says he often used Google’s Hindi search while drafting projects and reports. “For those of us who hail from small towns, the Hindi search engine is a blessing,” he said.

Some choose to use local languages as a show of patriotism. Indian celebrities such as Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan and singer Lata Mangeshkar, for instance, have often tweeted in Hindi using the Google tool.

So far, the response to Twitter in Hindi among Indian users has been positive. User @jitu9968 called on all Indian Twitter users to “fill one another’s twitter feed in Hindi.” Another enthusiastic user @dee__jay said “I hope Hindi soon becomes one of the most tweeted languages on Twitter!”

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